Your Permanent Record

July 24, 2003 | Source: Wired

By the decade’s end, we’ll have a fully realized digital memory management system, with the storage capacity approaching the largest paper-and-ink archive on earth, says Microsoft CTO David Vaskevitch.

Every picture or video snippet that you shoot be embedded with date and GPS location information. Your OS will include sophisticated face-matching software. Photos will categorize themselves “automagically” and provide us with a second memory system — a backup for our brains — that eventually will be, in its own way, as powerful as the first.

When that time comes, the computer itself will make a historic transition from something that is used for analytic tasks to something that can elicit emotion. You could say that it will become a right-brain machine instead of a left-brain machine.